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The tough-talking police chief then encouraged drug users and pushers who turned themselves in to the police to go to the houses of the drug lords, douse their houses with gasoline and set them ablaze.

(They are enjoying the money you had brought them, but they are ruining you while they are enjoying. You know who the drug lords here are. You want to kill them? Kill them. You can kill because you are the victims.

(You know who the drug lords here are. Go to their house, douse it in gasoline and set it on fire. Show them your rage.)

There were 232,685 cases of crimes against persons involving physical injury reported in the Philippines in 2014, for a population of 98 million. By comparison, the UNODC says there were, in the same year, nearly 375,000 cases of assault in the U.K., which, with a population of 64 million, has far fewer people.

In 2014, there were 10,294 reported cases of rape in the Philippines. But there were more than 30,000 cases in the U.K.; 12,157 in France (which has a roughly similar population to the U.K. at 66 million); and 6,294 in Sweden, for a population of just 9.5 million.

That same year, there were 52,798 reported robbery cases in the Philippines. That’s about as many as there were in Costa Rica (52,126 cases) but Costa Rica, with 4.7 million people, has less than a 20th of the population of the Philippines, so the Philippine rate is much lower. The total is also far fewer than the 171,686 cases reported in Belgium (population 11.2 million).

Neither is firearm ownership high in the Philippines. According to the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, which researches the number of privately owned firearms worldwide, there are 4.7 guns per 100,000 people in the Philippines, putting it at a lowly 105th place in a list of 179 countries. Finland has 45.3 guns per 100,000 people, Canada has 30, and Australia has 15.

Unsurprisingly, while the Philippines can be a deadly place, it is not especially so. According to World Bank data, the Philippine rate of 9 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2013 makes it only slightly more dangerous than Lithuania (7) or Mongolia (7), and puts it on a par with Russia (9). The U.S. figure is 4.

In the five years from 2010 to ’15, PNP figures show that total murders across the nation’s top 15 cities averaged 1,202 a year. But many more people have already died in the first seven weeks of Duterte’s drug war.

“In the opinion of many Filipinos, law and order is a major issue and previous administrations weren’t effective or dedicated in addressing it,” Richard Javad Heydarian, a professor of political science at Manila’s De La Salle University, tells TIME in an email. Duterte, he says, “has a lot of political capital to dispense with.”

But that was before the bodies began to pile up. Now, less than two months later, many others are appalled at the forces that have been unleashed. There is also deep shock at the drug war’s financial implications: Duterte has given huge funding boosts to the police and military by slashing the country’s health budget by 25%, and reducing expenditure on critical sectors like agriculture, labor, employment and foreign affairs. On the other hand, the budget for the presidential office has increased tenfold, and now includes a provision of $150 million for “representation and entertainment.”

“Whether it’s state-sanctioned or not, I would say at the very least all of these killings are state-inspired,” says de Lima.

A former chairperson of the country’s Commission on Human Rights and Secretary of Justice under the previous administration, de Lima has been waging an effectively lone battle from within the government against Duterte for the past two months.

The 56-year-old lawmaker, who also heads the Senate’s Committee on Justice and Human Rights, called for a probe into the extrajudicial killings two weeks after Duterte assumed office. She faced an intense backlash on social media from Duterte supporters, who vilified her as “a coddler and a protector,” in her words, of the country’s drug syndicates. Duterte’s own response has been to launch a smear campaign; he is attempting to convince Filipinos that de Lima is in the pay of drug gangs and that she has had “sex escapades” (his words) with her driver, who, he suggests, collects bribes on her behalf. In the present climate, when people accused of far less are being shot dead, bandying around these sorts of tall stories is deeply threatening.

It is not difficult to understand the sociological reasons behind the popularity of Duterte’s killing spree. For urban centres and mega-cities, crime and drugs are everyday issues that make life miserable for rich and poor communities alike.

In my fieldwork, my informants in slum communities have expressed relief when drug dealers have been gunned down. After all, they are the menaces who beat their wives, starve their children and bang on the doors of cowering neighbours while high on meth. They are the syndicates responsible for teenagers running red-eyed and for young mothers hauling cocaine in cheap suitcases to airports in China and Indonesia.

Upon hearing about the death of a drug pusher, an ordinary Filipino is afforded a sense of finality, if not retribution. The troublemaker is gone and will harm their families no more.

But why killings? Why can’t there be support for humane ways of being “tough” on crime?

Part of the reason has to do with a criminal justice system that has failed over the years. Arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning drug pushers is so slow, so bureaucratic and so prone to corruption that it has discredited the democratic virtue of due process.
What is the point of putting drug dealers behind bars if everyone knows the maximum-security prison has become a fiefdom run by convicted drug lords? In 2014, media reports revealed that prison cells had been converted to strip clubs, private gyms, recording studios and drug laboratories, with the occasional jacuzzi installed. Jail wardens were either too corrupt or too afraid to confront the felons.

There is a petition calling for the wearing of body cameras by Philippine policemen carrying out the drug raids/ and house to house inspections (tokhang operation). If the policemen are carrying out the raids and tokhang operations within the bounds of law and in adherence of their own SOPs and rules of engagement, then they should have nothing to worry about. The footage from the body cameras should be able to help them convince their detractors and get them off their backs.

Kudos to the petition initiator for putting forward a solution that actually makes sense. Whether the PNP will accept and adopt the proposal is highly doubtful. But then again, miracles can happen.